Successful dog training requires dog owners to have an open mind for a lifestyle change ( passive training) with the effective training protocols ( active training). The client-trainer relationship is only successful when there is mutual trust between both parties in order to work as a TEAM to help transform your dog.
At Disciplined K9, we want our clients to build an incredible bond and a respectful relationship with their dog. We believe state of mind training is more important than obedience. When your dog perceive the world with a calm state of mind, they can hear you better to follow your guidance without being overly adrenalized and anxious. With right mindset, they automatically make better choices and conscious decisions. Therefore state of mind training helps to increase your dog’s obedience performance. We strongly believe in structure, leadership and boundaries. We don’t do shortcuts, it’s very essential to do the fundamental foundation work and not skip any steps before tackling the behavioral issue head on. Think of it like building a house, you want the foundation to be solid, otherwise everything else will eventually fall apart.
We are balanced trainers, which means we use four quadrants of operant conditioning methods: Positive Reinforcement, Positive Punishment, Negative Reinforcement, and Negative Punishment. We use positive reinforcement 95% of the time to reward dogs for making good choices. Meanwhile we apply corrections (5%) for bad choices. We also coach dog owners how to recognize different drives in their dogs and how to utilize our advanced teaching method to switch them to problem solve a lot of the common behavioral issues. Balanced training methods give us the ability to communicate effectively to our dogs. This makes it easy and very clear for them to understand what exact behaviors we encourage and which ones we discourage. Raising a dog is very similar to raising your child. We need to teach them “yes” and “no” so they know how to tolerate and handle stress in the real world by making the right choices.
We would highly recommend reading our About page to see our philosophy. Another great way to see our work in action is through our Instagram @Disciplined K9. You can find other FAQ’s below which will help you understand our views on dog training, and why we train the way we train. Every dog is different, but we always try to be creative and open minded with every dog we work with. Please feel free to email us. We can determine which tools and training methods will serve you and your dog best.
Absolutely YES! We work with dogs with all kinds of behavioral issues and bad habits even with severe human/dog aggression. When you contact us for a consultation, we want you to be very honest about your dog’s background and behavioral problems in regards to safety of both the trainer and others, so that we can design a specific plan for you and your dog,.
Every dog deserves a happy, balanced, healthy life. Your dog counts on you to achieve that. To be your dog’s leader, you must advocate for him at all times. With that being said, we don’t allow strangers, dogs, even children to approach them, especially if you have an anxious or socially insecure dog. In fact, a lot of people don’t know how to approach a dog, sometimes it only takes one bad encounter for your dog to lose trust on you. As humans, and as their pack leaders, we must think from their perspective and be considerate. Your dog can’t talk, that’s why we need to step in to be their voice by advocating for them. We understand, it must sound harsh to tell people “Sorry, my dog is not comfortable, please don’t pet him or her” But that isn’t our concern. In fact, the majority of the general public would put their sense of safety aside to pet cute dogs who might have behavioral problems. You will most likely to be blamed on when an accident happens. On the other hand, we never know if other dogs are vaccinated or not when approaching ours. Diseases and canine flu are very easy to transmit through air and saliva. It’s our responsibility to protect our dog . It’s our responsibility to keep our dog safe. With your help, your dog will be happy, balanced, and healthy.
We want our dogs to know that we love them dearly, so we naturally like to use our high-pitched tone to greet our dogs to get them excited.
As a matter of fact, it’s human unconscious habit to respond to adorable things. Some owners are naturally compassionate, nurturing, and gentle. When these amazing traits apply to dog psychology, dogs would sometime perceive them as soft energy and a lack of authority mindset. Remember, dogs have pack drive. They love to follow a strong leader. If we always project a soft energy and always give them unlimited affection, they would not only learn to pushy and disrespectful, they would also take over your leadership role. This baby talking is very important to be addressed. When we try to teach our dog a new behavior, it’s very important to keep our tone neural and clear so that we don’t confuse our dog with emotion distractions either positive or negative. This gives our dogs the best chance to perform at their best when assigning them to a task. However, when your dog obeys a command or offer good behaviors by default, it is totally appropriate to raise your tone to “mark ” the behavior. When your dog has been well behaved, there is no harm to praise them a little just don’t over-reward. Likewise, when you mark a bad behavior, you can deepen your tone a bit but you should never yell or shout. We understand that it takes some time to change a habit, but for your dog’s long lasting balanced journey, it is all worth it.
No matter how smart dogs are, and how much we think they understand us. Keep in mind that humans and dogs are two biologically different species. Human psychology and dog psychology are different. When we feel nervous, anxious, upset, we offer physical touch to comfort each other because that’s how humans communicate. Everything becomes a reward in dog training, if a dog wants a piece of chicken in my hand, the chicken becomes a reward. However, when a dog is nervous, anxious or overly excited. If we offer affection or use our soft tone voice saying “it’s ok” to calm your dog down, you’re not only reinforcing the behavior and you’re also unconsciously encouraging them to do it again in the future. When and how to give affection is crucial, pay attention to your dog’s state of mind before comforting them.
The short answer is No.
It’s important to keep in mind that dogs are not machines, they are living and breathing beings with different personalities, temperaments and with an opportunistic mindset. Meanwhile we are working with dog owners with different levels of skillset backgrounds at the same time. Every dog’s learning ability varies, anxious, fearful dogs and dogs who have a bite history with other behavioral issues will usually take longer to be rehabilitated. Generally speaking, we need time to first break old unhealthy patterns and bad habits, then it could take about 28 d ays to form new good habits. We want to see results as much as you do. That’s why we always do our best to bring out your dog’s full potential in the most efficient way possible. However, please understand that there’s no magic wand or shortcut in dog training. Changes are inevitable when it comes to successful dog training and it is your responsibility to be open minded to change your lifestyle, maintain your dog’s new training plan and follow a consistent structured based daily routine for long lasting results.
No, this is actually a myth. Everything can be abusive when we don’t use it correctly even a flat collar can hurt a dog. Some competition sport dogs, protection dogs and Police K9s use e-collar to perform tasks along with a great relationship with the handler. Meanwhile, the dogs are still happy and healthy. When we use e-collar properly, we have found that e-collar training is actually very effective to help anxious, nervous dogs. E-collar can also help strengthen your relationship with your dog. Because we use the e-collar as a communication tool to tell your dog “yes” and “no”. Therefore, your dog will follow your direction and leadership. Let’s say, there’s a car approaching, you call your dog to come for their safety. Otherwise, you might end up with a $2000 vet bill and a severely injured dog. That is one of the reasons why we love to use the e-collar. “Shock collars” in the old days did not have current technology to have a very gentle stimulation. With the development of advanced technology, the e-collars we recommend are not what they used to be. This collar has 100 adjustable levels of muscle stimulation, which is based on the same technology used by chiropractors with TENS units. It gives us a better approach to direct our dog. All dogs thrive for humans to provide rules and boundaries with consequences, so that they can trust us and feel protected by us. We DO NOT recommend you use it without our trainer’s instructions, because we want to condition dog to have a positive approach to it.
We are balanced trainers and we focus primarily on state of mind training while we use a variety of training tools-from food, praise, physical touch, play to reinforcement and correction to achieve your training goals. Every dog is unique, some dogs need certain tools, some dogs don’t. We don’t believe in “one-size-fits-all” method and we train the dog in front of us with an open mind and creativity. We take what we do very seriously and we take our time to properly condition any training tools before using them to teach desired behaviors and to stop unwanted behaviors. We build a relationship based on trust and mutual respect. Our goal is to help rebuild your relationship and create an incredible bond with your dog to where you both can enjoy this beautiful life together and for your dog to thrive in this modern world that was not designed for them. Unfortunately, the positive only community has done tremendous disservice to the dog owning community by using greatly exaggerated statements and inflammatory terms to label certain training tools that are super valuable and useful for dog owners who need them. A slip lead, prong collar and E-collar DO NOT HURT your dog, when they are being used with praise and encouragement thoughtfully and with the guidance of a knowledgeable trainer, can be a great resource to build reliability in the real world.
Although we do not expect everyone to be comfortable with our method, dog owners come to us for professional assistance that’s beyond their knowledge and skillset to problem solve. More likely than not, you dog’s bad state of mind and other behavioral issues are the manifestation of the root cause correlated with their genetics, your current lifestyle and management etc . It’s important for dog owners to keep an open mind and have trust in your trainer’s ability to guide you through this learning journey with the help of some tools that we may or may not use without any judgement, reservations and misleading information online. We do not change our method when it comes to serious cases, or any case for that matter. ( If you’re interested in Board & Train or 100% reliable recall, the E- collar is definitely required)
The short answer is No.
- Due to the precious training time, we want to spend more time training your dog and not planning and coordinating visits.
- It may impede our training and we have a very specific protocol for introducing dogs back to their owners after training. The purpose is to keep our program effective and make sure your dog’s transitioning back home goes successfully. It’s likely that your dog has an association to you with lots of love but not a lot of respect. Oftentimes, the owner’s presence would trigger their dog’s anxiety and bad state of mind to resurface while we are rebuilding new habits and breaking old patterns which could lead to regression during this crucial period.
- It’s a great opportunity for owners to be away from their dog to work on their leadership skills , confidence and reset your state of mind around your dog. So when you reunite with your dog, you’re ready to go!
The number of Board & Train dogs that stay with us is 1-3 per trainer.
Your Board & Train will only be successful when we have mutual trust.
It’s totally understandable that you may feel worried and anxious being away from your dog for this long. We want to focus more on their training and not spend our precious training time on our phone to check in with clients via text on a daily basis. ( we used to get large amount of daily update inquires from clients, it was a bit overwhelming to both keep up with constant communication and training productivity ) No news is good news! That means your dog is adjusting well to their new environment and doing amazing everyday according to our training plan, we also don’t want to text/call frequently to reinforce client’s anxious attachment to their dog. However, we post 1-2 times a week with training videos+ photos updates on our Instagram @DisciplinedK9, and we will immediately contact you if we notice any odd behaviors or health concerns.
While your dog will be immersed in training and basically living with the trainer. Unlike other service industries, where you can clock in and clock out. Although we absolutely love what we do, there’s no denying that operating a dog training business and being a dog trainer are a 24/7 demanding job, such as doing admin work, cleaning kennels, playing with them, late night potties, handling whining and barking at all hours, and cleaning up accidents even after you’re done training for the day etc. Please understand that our trainers need breaks and a day off too. While we don’t do any “active training” on our day off, but we still maintain their structure with “passive training” management, your dog still gets to have potty breaks , play & interaction time and most importantly for your dog to learn how to switch off their energy and decompress during their downtime etc.
It’s important to remember that during those off camera days, we are still working hard with your dog. Most of the daily training sessions are repetitions, we want to post new and refreshing content updates online each time. Board & train is a great opportunity not only for your dog to learn new skills but also for owners to be away from their dog to work on their leadership skills , confidence, and reset their state of mind around their dog since a lot of the fearful and anxious behaviors are relationship related.
We appreciate your patience and understanding. Please trust the process, sit back and enjoy your little vacation. 🙂